The Network as a platform to deliver the Digital Oilfield

By Ross Philo, Director, Global Energy Solutions, Cisco

Executive overview
As the energy industry resumes capital investments and exploration, the Digital Oilfield – sometimes referred to as the eField, iField or SmartField – continues to be heralded as the best way for oil and gas companies to reduce lifting costs, increase efficiency, dramatically improve recovery and safety, and enhance employee retention and job satisfaction. To those addressing these critical business issues, it quickly becomes evident that the network provides a common underlying thread and thus can be used to deliver game-changing solutions across the enterprise.

By extending a single Internet Protocol (IP) network throughout the enterprise – including hazardous and challenging environments such as rigs, platforms, refineries, pipelines and petrochemical plants – companies can make the Digital Oilfield a reality. A multifaceted approach to deploying the network can deliver improvements to operations and maintenance, better sense-and-respond capabilities, more effective collaboration, and improved plant availability, safety and security.

Progress in realizing the Digital Oilfield is being made in two unique and fundamental ways. First, companies are beginning to address access and data-control issues relative to their networks by moving from individual network infrastructure deployments for each company operating in shared environments, such as a rig, platform or refinery, to a single, shared IP infrastructure. Second, an oil and gas company's single enterprise network has the capability to securely manage and monitor processes and allow safe and responsive decision making for all its assets, tasks that have historically been addressed through complex and proprietary process-control networks.

The solutions needed to bring these processes together for a more coherent approach toward a unified network infrastructure exist today, but realizing the true potential of the Digital Oilfield has been elusive. Although it will require vision, consensus and a shared commitment to turn this dream into reality, the potential financial benefits for the early adopters are significant.

Historical perspective
While every industry perceives its challenges to be unique, the energy enterprise is encountering performance, access and security challenges similar to those faced by the industrial and financial services sectors. It was not too long ago that the world financial system – banks, stock exchanges, brokerages – dealt with all monetary exchanges via proprietary collection, distribution and exchange systems. As global financial markets became more intertwined, with more entities touching and supporting transactions, the need for a unified system of exchange was inevitable. Eventually, the demand for more exchanges increased exponentially, and with it, the need for standard technologies, such as IP technology, that could handle millions of real-time messages and trades every day. Now, the latest advancements in networking facilitate the wireless transfer of billions of dollars a day with assured data control and security. The analysis, movement and security of vast amounts of information have become a critical part of the financial industry’s operations.

Mirroring the infrastructure, security and data issues of the financial markets, an energy company searching for oil or gas encounters potentially dozens of vendors who are working at specific sites to provide specialized services. In this situation, oil and gas corporations are obliged to either offer access to their local infrastructure, or more typically, the vendors that work onsite must bring their own technology to link back to their companies' networks.

Elsewhere in the enterprise, energy companies are continuing to use proprietary infrastructures in hazardous environments, since these networks have traditionally been perceived as more secure and robust than the alternatives. Also, while many might consider a wholesale shift to IP-based standards, there is a need in the industry for further education and case studies about how these technologies can provide the same level of security, access, control and response as the oil and gas industry's current network infrastructures.

In this context, it is easy to see why the Digital Oilfield has been slow to become a reality. However, as the financial sector saw, the advances in technology, the Internet revolution and the shift to IP-based standards have brought greater security capabilities and data control as well as the ability to link all pieces of an energy company's assets through a single common network infrastructure.

Leveraging the network as a platform for change
More than anything else, the emergence of IP networking over the last ten years is helping companies move toward the Digital Oilfield. The growth of the Internet has driven the adoption of IP as the accepted and definitive standard for any modern computer network. Older systems have had to evolve in the face of the huge growth of the Internet, which has now raised the expectations of end users.

With broadband connections linked to wireless networks at home and the workplace, users have come to expect easy-to-use interoperable applications and rapid access to information irrespective of location. As vendors adapt their solutions to the new reality of IP networking, a whole new spectrum of solutions is available to facilitate faster decision making, foster collaboration between employees and vendors, and transform the whole meaning of "work".

A unified solution
Today, a company no longer has to provide its own infrastructure for an offshore rig, platform or refinery, because the technology exists to safely and securely deploy a network infrastructure that all companies can share. The network can be linked to existing satellite, microwave, and long-range wireless or fiber-optic connections to connect each company to its respective network or to the Internet. The overall bandwidth of the terrestrial link may need to increase, but the cost should be almost insignificant compared to the savings gained through shared infrastructure, enhanced risk mitigation and increased productivity.

While most companies in the short term are still likely to maintain separate enterprise and process-control networks, the secure management of process-control networks can also exist in this single, unified network environment. New IP technologies offer the network availability, response time and capabilities to monitor sensors and controls while continually providing real-time data for critical business and sometimes life-saving decision making.

A unified communications infrastructure for the entire enterprise delivers several potential benefits and improved business processes such as cost savings, interoperability and simplicity. Companies can focus on differentiating their services instead of concentrating on building proprietary infrastructure and linking disparate data access models.

For instance, by having a single network and embracing industry data-exchange standards, productivity can be considerably increased with data transfers occurring in real time, which helps ensure that the right data is delivered to the right individual at the right time, enabling better-informed decisions. As an added benefit, individuals located either in the field or onshore will be able to access the corporate network via mobile devices, with access to the same information and resources as they would have in their corporate office. A key concern, particularly at rigs and refineries, is the physical safety of employees. With an IP-based surveillance system, individuals will be able to remotely monitor hazardous areas to check for leaks, dangerous situations, physical threats or other security issues.

A single unified communications network can benefit all users and still maintain a high level of security to segregate traffic, protect data and so on. And the potential cost savings can be significant. By tying together data streams in a common infrastructure, the ability of systems to readily predict events by continuously monitoring operations can allow companies to avoid costly failures and reduce expensive, unplanned downtime. In an industry suffering from a shortage of skilled workers, employee retention and job satisfaction can be greatly enhanced with the ability to remotely monitor operations either from an office or from home, and location-based services will allow operators to keep track of people and assets.

Ensuring business value through security
A major impediment to the creation of the Digital Oilfield is the concern companies have about the security of their highly confidential data streams in a shared network. Although these concerns might have been warranted a few years ago, they fail to take into account recent dramatic improvements in ensuring and monitoring network security, so that the solutions described here can be provided in a tightly secured and properly managed environment.

A unique approach is to drive security into the fundamental level of the network in order to manage and segregate traffic, secure data and allow for faster response to threats in real time. With this approach, policies are concurrently reliable, reactive, available and responsive, which is crucial for rigs, platforms or refineries that need to continuously monitor pressures, flows, sensors, safety valves, and the like. This allows the Digital Oilfield to instantly recognize, track and quarantine any problems throughout the entire network while other facets of the network remain active and available. This quality of service (QoS) can also be applied to ensure that large data transfers do not impede other activities, such as accessing key applications.

Furthermore, as the network expands and incorporates more devices, there can be no guarantee that the only devices on the network will be Windows-based PCs – indeed, a modern network will include computers of all descriptions, plus process controllers, smart devices, sensors, and more. Security models need to protect all of these devices, and the logical place to manage this in a coherent manner is at the network layer. This security-in-depth approach addresses all previous concerns, while also delivering unified and consistent management of security policies and procedures.

Reaping the benefits of the Digital Oilfield
Progress toward achieving the Digital Oilfield has been slow, and this has given rise to a certain degree of frustration and skepticism in some quarters, but the technology already exists to turn it into a reality. While handling the logistics of maintaining and owning this single infrastructure can be challenging, new business models will emerge for oil and gas enterprises to address these challenges.

Companies that adopt the available technologies in a visionary manner, leveraging the power of the unified communications IP network and creating a single, shared infrastructure, will see a transformation of their business in terms of more efficient processes, reduced costs and increased employee satisfaction – all of which will translate into improved performance from the bottom hole to the bottom line. It’s the logical final step toward a system in which energy companies can run everything in a virtual web of locations, people and assets, making optimum use of shared data and computing power, as well as knowledge.